Hi Allison,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were achievement, hedonism, and benevolence.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.
You said your top three talents were social, artistic / spatial, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get all a’s .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said get an A on my exam .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said relieved satisfied energized .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said trip this weekend .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: when i wake up, i will study a lecture .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt anxious when receiving critical feedback, and anxious when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel Warm .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| It's not about how talented you are, but what you do with it |
| even though interest and enjoyment are positive emotions, they are different |
| talents are what come easily to you |
| curiosity makes people like you |
| goals bridge intention action gap |
| flow is a state where high challenge meets high skill |
| advice is forward looking and benefits advisor |
| allostasis is achieving stability through variability |
| systems over willpower |
| lean on relationships |
| self transcendence is doing things for others not yourself |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| |
| Maria Irias Cardenas |
| Allison is an incredibly hard working, determined and kind hearted person. I loved talking to her this semester about her goals dreams and aspirations. As a fellow wharton student, Allie has been a type of role model for me having been where I am now not too long ago. I appreciate her openness and friendliness when sharing different experiences and life situations throughout the course.
I learned a lot from her discovery project. I loved seeing how she integrated her culture and a part of her identity which made it a lot more personal. From the beginning of the semester, she mentioned how she loved cooking but didn't have enough time for it ever since she came to college. I was able to see her turn something she liked doing into a goal and stuck to it to see it through. I loved to see how it evolved and turned into a great project overall.
|
| Allison Dao |
| This is me |
| Meera Bathwal |
| Allison has been an amazing team member this past semester. She always engages thoughtfully in our team discussions and contributes personal reflections that deepen the conversations. It is clear that she listens to what everyone else contributes to the conversation as well, because she is able to build off of other’s comments and provide her opinions on what we say. She is also extremely kind and I am happy to have become friends with her throughout the semester!
I thought that her Discovery Project presentation was really well put together. I especially loved the design of the slides! They were really pretty which helped me stay engaged during the whole presentation. She was also a really good public speaker. Allison sounded confident, made eye contact, and used a little bit of humor, which made it very enjoyable to watch. In terms of content, I loved learning about her journey learning to cook. Her experience in the People’s Kitchen sounded especially meaningful, and is something I would love to get involved in! |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.